


goldfloss stars in fiberglass hearts

by feralphoenix



Series: a heart is no king's throne [6]
Category: Undertale (Video Game)
Genre: American Sign Language, Autistic Frisk, Benevolent Player, Body Horror, Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - C-PTSD, Gen, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Nonverbal Frisk, Sharing a Body, Spoilers, Temporary Character Death, Video Game Mechanics
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-14
Updated: 2018-06-14
Packaged: 2019-05-23 06:55:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,066
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14929356
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/feralphoenix/pseuds/feralphoenix
Summary: Chara and Frisk reach an ending.





	goldfloss stars in fiberglass hearts

**Author's Note:**

> _(you’re not something someone forgot_ – i have the beginnings of something but i need a gentler middle, and some assurance of an unbent [ending](https://marchenwings.tumblr.com/post/147673887794/))

The order comes for you to dodge left and you throw all your weight behind it—your agony at Asgore forcing Frisk into fighting him was well and truly washed away by shock, and that shock is wearing away into hot wrath. Flowey’s taunts, his attempts to cow Frisk, seem tinny and distant compared to the afterimage of Asgore’s body dissolving into white dust and his soul shattering under a shower of bullets. If that smug little fucking flower thinks he’s so tough now that he’s dressed up as a shitty creepypasta, well, he can just _bring it on._ You’ll make _salad_ out of him.

Frisk doesn’t respond to you or the player. They just stand there.

Flowey’s bullets tear through their arms and legs and stomach and their blood splatters out into the void and you don’t get to see if there’s a floor for it to land on because a jet of flame engulfs their whole body and Flowey is cackling

and the pain shuts out as easy as if someone switched a TV off, and you’re disjointed from reality again the same as when that _stupid weed_ absorbed the six human souls.

What the _fuck._ You yell this out loud too—“What the _fuck!”_ —and you grab Frisk’s shoulders, digging your fingers into the worn fabric of their shirt. You realize belatedly that you have _arms,_ hands with which you can grab them, and that’s kind of weird but you have more important things to worry about right now.

Frisk doesn’t look at you. They actively avoid making eye contact, tucking their chin down and hiding behind their hair. You dig your nails in and shake them. “What the _FUCK!_ What were you just _standing_ there for?! He killed—we can’t _let_ him—why won’t you _fight back!”_

They start to quiver under your touch. Their breathing is soft and ragged and too-fast. They don’t speak but you can hear their voice in your head same as you usually can. _I can’t—I can’t—I don’t want to fight anymore. I can’t do it anymore, I can’t, I can’t._

You bite your lip until you taste blood, but—some of your frustration cools and peters out at their tone, just enough for your conscience to remind you that you shut down and left them to deal with Asgore almost completely on their own. And they _floundered,_ faced with an enemy that wouldn’t let them show mercy; you made yourself into an inert conduit between them and the player and they _eventually_ listened to the player’s orders to fight but they _wailed_ through it all. They’re utterly emotionally spent. Through the palms of your hands you can feel their numbness, a yawning chasm where their ability to care used to go.

“Well, if you _can’t,_ then let _me!”_ you snap. You can feel something distant along the umbilical cord of determination that keeps you tethered to the player, a tingly pins-and-needles sensation like fingers wiggling after they’ve gone to sleep. They dropped out on you the first time you were plunged into this weird void too—with the power of the six souls, Flowey must be able to temporarily disrupt your connection to each other somehow, maybe is messing with whatever interface the player uses to interact with your world. It’s taking them less time to come back now. “I’ll fight for you, I’ll get him back for Asgore, I am _not letting him have this world—”_

And then you’re back in the dark in front of Flowey, who taunts you for not learning your lesson. You’re barely listening—blood is pounding in your ears, and you shove Frisk frozen and timid out of control of their own body and you reach out and grab your knife out of the air and when Flowey fires a volley of bullets at you you’re already running.

You duck the bullets and roll under the flamethrowers and whirl around with thin red lasers targeting you to try to find a good place to fucking _stab_ but you’re too low and thick thorny vines shoot after you as you run, shredding Frisk’s shirt and then their skin and then their flesh and muscle and it hurts _so fucking much more_ when you’re in the driver’s seat, it slows you down. You get one good slash in at Flowey’s gargantuan cactus arm but it doesn’t even seem to faze him, and then thorns grip your legs and you hear a sickening gristly _pop—_

Frisk dies again before that can go on any longer, before you can really appreciate how painful that was, but you return to the void roaring. Your ears are ringing and your arms and legs are shaking; you feel like a Chara-shaped mold of boiling adrenaline.

You have _form_ here but you don’t feel fully corporeal—you’re breathing so hard you’d probably faint if you had a body, you feel desperately sick too, but you don’t pass out or double over and there’s no urge to retch. You try to shake your arms out, as if that will carry over to the real world when you revive; next to you Frisk just hugs themself and rocks from heels to toes, not commenting.

Reconnecting feels less like pins and needles this time and more like someone has reached out through the dark and clasped your hand. The player’s reflexes have been slow with maybe fear, and they definitely feel _nervous,_ but they’re starting to get angry too.

_We have got to protect this world._

You slide on Frisk’s knees past the circular sprays of homing bullets, roll away from the flamethrowers, get up and run past the vines. The big ugly blank eyes in the middle of Flowey’s gray tube “petals” begin to flash and emit giant scrawled Xes that catch you in the shoulder, the arm, the thigh.

But you’re close enough to slash Flowey’s ugly fleshy maw this time. Even getting hit, you scream with Frisk’s thin tiny voice and your left arm swings out and you fucking smack him—

Pain punches through your back, though; blood floods your mouth and spews out and then the player is gone, and you’re back into the void with Frisk again.

“Fuck,” you wheeze. “Fuck, _fuck,_ I’m barely even doing any damage—”

 _I’m sorry,_ Frisk says miserably. _I’m sorry, I’m sorry—_

“It’s not _your_ fault,” you snap. They flinch.

 _I’m sorry I can’t do anything,_ they say, still, trembling and with fat tears dripping down their face as their mouth crumples. _I’m sorry I can’t help._

You take a deep breath and then another, reach out with your right hand to grab their left. You don’t have your knife right now, actually, though you died with it grasped tight in your left fist. You’re not even entirely sure where you’re pulling it out of to fight Flowey with, honestly; Frisk just put it in their phone when they picked it and your locket up, they were using the frying pan when fighting Asgore.

“I’m sorry, too,” you force yourself to say. “I’m sorry I left you to just—just deal with Asgore by yourself, I’m sorry this is happening. I—I’ll take care of as much of this as I can, but I don’t know how much I can, _we_ can, do without you. You don’t have to fight but—but if you see any openings, any opportunities to help out or fight the way _you_ know how to…” It galls you to say the word but you inhale through your nose and _make_ it come out of your mouth. _“Please_ just jump in and do it.”

Frisk is silent. They don’t pull their hand out of yours, though, and when you look at them they’re still rocking but they’re biting their own mouth, eyes narrowed. They sniff the snot dribbling down their face back into their nose—gross—and nod.

You die almost straight off the next time, unused to Frisk quivering but freshly alert at your mental shoulder instead of curled up in the back of your skull: Flowey’s bullets catch you and rip their leg off at the knee. It feels like someone jammed a handful of razors up your knee and then put a frayed cord in there, or something, and in the void you’re screaming in pain as much as in rage, sweat like hailstones dripping off your face and soaking through your shirt. Frisk grips your hand tight. You don’t yell at them.

The next time, you cut a thorn off Flowey’s shitty cactus arm before his vines skewer you. Numbness shoots all through your body, awful tingling _worse_ than pins and needles, and it’s all you can do to keep standing in the space between tries even _with_ Frisk’s help.

Then, though: Maybe the player’s got the hang of the different attacks Flowey uses, because their calls to you to dodge left and right through the rings of bullets are clear and they keep you running in wide circles so that the laser-targeted vines scrape your back and shoulders but don’t pierce right through you. They don’t take you close enough to stab Flowey this time, but—

Flowey stops attacking you, static crosses the TV screen in the middle of his ugly petals, and his body goes dark and fades out.

A human soul, identical to Frisk’s except that it’s cyan blue instead of red, appears in the middle of the TV. Sirens blare.

For a moment you see a human _behind_ the soul—a kid with a red ribbon in their hair and a pink skirt, arms held above their head at a painful-looking angle, pinned there by wires like marionette strings.

They don’t have a face. Instead there’s a gaping black void.

Their arms shudder in the strings. Their body disappears from your view, leaving only the struggling soul, which rises to the center of the TV screen.

Then the world around you is filled with gigantic bullets in the shape of knives, twirling end over end like a printed pattern. Each one is bigger than Frisk’s entire body. You duck and weave and try to find gaps to slide through them, but they keep nicking at your arms and legs and you can’t stop thinking about the dead child’s face and you want more than _anything_ to just run—

The player finds an open space in the knives and guides you to it, shaking and wheezing and shivering and dripping blood, and—Frisk, who is thinking of a faded ribbon in a pile of leaves and a plastic knife you found on the ramparts of Home what feels like a million years ago, forces the word _“Help”_ out of their throat. It creaks as it goes, barely louder than a whisper.

But the bullets begin to shake and stop twirling.

A second child appears on the screen and wrenches the marionette strings away with their bare hands, freeing the first; the pale blue soul disappears, replaced by an orange one. There’s a great flash and the bullets all turn green and warp into gigantic band-aids. These zoom straight to you, washing over you in waves of soothing coolness. Your injuries melt away into whole unblemished flesh, and fresh energy helps you stand straight again.

Flowey’s screen-face goes to static again and his body reappears.

The sky fills with a billion black bombs stamped with Flowey’s stupid smirking face, each a miniature of the atom bombs you’ve seen in gray photos on the internet. They begin to fall in twos and threes, making you run left and right to avoid them—when they hit they erupt in plumes of flame, scorching your heels. No sooner has Flowey run out of those when a giant fly trap’s head blooms from his arm, sucking in flies as big as Frisk—they ram you and bowl you over like a herd of stampeding bulls. Great green ugly balls of spikes with ravening mouths erupt from you don’t even fucking know where—they chew at Frisk’s limbs and you tear away from them and to your feet. No matter where you turn they seem to appear right in front of you.

You remember the knife in your hand and lash out. Distantly you hear Flowey squawk, and green sap flies instead of Frisk’s blood.

He didn’t make _noise_ before when you hit him, did he? He still doesn’t seem _fazed_ by your strike, but—

The bastard doesn’t give you time to think. Vines catch you and rip your body to shreds again, sending you back to the void.

 _“Fuck!”_ you shriek. How are you supposed to manage to protect yourself and Frisk when you can’t even grab two seconds to think about how to do that?!

Frisk grabs _your_ shoulders this time. You jump a little—you didn’t realize that you had shoulders to grab, and you forgot what it was like for anyone to touch them, it’s… it’s been so long since Asriel.

 _Don’t give up,_ they tell you. _I think—it wasn’t much but you DID hurt him. And we managed to reach one of the souls, so maybe…_

“If things go weird again then—then yeah, you do your thing,” you say. You reach up between your bodies to press your hands to your face, grind their heels against your eyes. God, you hope you don’t have to do all that again.

 _If you do, I’m—we’re here to help you,_ Frisk offers, timid.

You open your mouth to respond to this, but words of gratitude are too alien and won’t come to your tongue when you bid them. You’re thrust back into the world of the living before you can come up with an answer that feels adequate.

 _Look!_ Frisk yells straight off, directing your eyes to the lowermost “petal” on your left. The segmented pipe seems darker gray than it was before.

The player orders you to duck forward and you spring into action without trying to crane your neck to see how Flowey’s trying to kill you _this_ time. When they yell for you to move back the other way you get more of an eyeful than you wanted: Grotesque hands are sprouting on the ends of comically thin vines, white daisies with smiley faces in the middle of their petals sprouting from their fingertips. The hands form finger guns, and the fingers explode off of them when the guns “fire”. You try to follow the player’s commands but Frisk’s body freezes, their stomach lurching, their body trying to gag.

Pillowy flesh and pollen mowing you over are _disgusting._ You’re battered back and forth between the horrible projectiles like a human pinball until you find your feet again, bruised all over, hobbling.

Sirens blare. Flowey fades into the background. You’re almost relieved.

The orange soul that interrupted the last attack reappears on Flowey’s face. The child it belongs to appears shortly after, arms wrenched and tied behind them to keep them from pulling away. The badly drawn human abs on the bandanna tied around their neck are distinctive. They have a face, but it’s not a human one—you _remember_ seeing that leering jack-o-lantern grin on Flowey before, and it makes the hair stand up on your back.

Giant bullets appear again: These in the shape of circles of gloves that contract and expand. On tiptoe, you try to avoid getting caught in their wheels as they spin; the circles seem to go on forever, though, and you have to dodge between them and then quickly out again as they continue to move. It takes Frisk a good few moments to squeak out another quiet _“Help”,_ for you to find a circle missing one glove so that they can.

The effect is instantaneous, though—there’s a flash as the child with the orange soul is pulled away by another one, and the orange soul is replaced by a dark blue one. The fingers on the gloves curl in, leaving only the thumbs extended, and the bullets turn bright green. Frisk commandeers their body’s right arm to stretch out and touch them, accepting their healing and recovering precious stamina that Flowey had nearly beat out of you.

This time when Flowey’s face goes to static and his body reappears there’s a sharp pain in your head, a sensation you remember—someone’s saved a file, but it definitely wasn’t you or Frisk or the player.

And now _both_ of his lower petals have gone dark. Your body is bathed in lasers, you barely leap to the side in time to avoid being shredded by thorny vines, but you’re grinning. You’re getting somewhere—

Flowey yells, annoyed, and then your sinuses ache and you’re several feet to the right with a million lasers trained on you. Your escape is even _narrower_ this time. The little piece of shit has started savescumming to try to kill you!

You do not get a chance to attack. Flowey keeps trying to pull you into the lasers and you dodge through them three times only to get yanked back, but warning sirens go off again almost _immediately._

The blue-souled child in their frilly tutu and purple toe shoes appears, balanced on one toe, hung from wires like a decoration. Their face is another gaping horror you’ve seen on Flowey’s and they’re twitching where they’re held.

You’re trapped between two tight lanes of spinning star bullets, a conveyor belt of massive toe shoes stomping down on you. The huge bullets pummel your body to the ground again and again, but—there’s something odd.

Especially as weak as Frisk’s body was when Flowey started using the blue soul’s power to attack you, these bullets ought to be killing you right now. You can barely even stand up. The next shoe to land on you ought to flatten you into paste like a squished bug, but Frisk’s bones don’t snap, your connection with the player isn’t broken. The blue soul’s owner—that human, even though Flowey has them bound and is using them like a weapon, they’re _resisting._

Irony is bitter in the back of your throat. You spit blood and bile so that when a blank comes in between the shoe bullets you can put your breath behind Frisk’s call for help.

Another human must come to free the ballet dancer from Flowey’s bonds—you don’t see how they do it, but when you stagger upright the shoes have all lifted away and instead of stars you’re surrounded by music notes. There’s a purple soul onscreen instead of the blue one.

You reach out both arms to touch the notes on either side of you and run, scooping up healing magic on both sides.

When Flowey comes back you’re ready—you lash out straight away, cut a chunk out of his arm. He _yells._ Three of his petals are dull now. You’re not making much of a dent but the player’s touch is defter now, their view of his attacks is clearer than yours and you respond as automatically as you can to their commands. You still get hit but you don’t get _plowed._

The klaxons sound for the fourth time, the purple soul popping back up on Flowey’s face. Behind their cloudy glasses their face is a cycle of roving blinking eyes that turn in a wheel. Frisk moans and you reach up with your right hand to forcibly turn their head away.

As with the blue soul’s magic, Flowey channels a narrow lane to trap you with: The walls are made of giant notebooks, from which emerge giant words with negative meanings: _SLAUGHTER, SADNESS, HATE, DESTROY, CORRUPT._ You step carefully through them like you’re jaywalking through heavy traffic.

Frisk’s call for help reaches the green soul: The child who owns it is large and bulky, and gently lifts the purple soul away from Flowey’s control with seemingly no effort. The notebook walls are still white and impassable, but the words that come out of them have been changed to kind ones. You step into HOPE and through LIFE.

You’re watching Flowey’s screen this time when his body reappears, and a weird distorted human face flickers there, its eyes bulging, laughing when you don’t dodge in time and get bullets full in the chest. You stagger, but try to get your head back in the game.

The player knows how to dodge his shitty attacks now, you’ve got a good rhythm, and Frisk has found a way to help you. Four of the souls under Flowey’s control have… rebelled, or been freed, or whatever. There are two left. And then…

And then what, exactly? Even when you manage to cut at Flowey you’re barely damaging him. You’re making _progress_ of some sort but it’s achingly slow.

 _Don’t think like that,_ Frisk pleads. _Don’t lose hope now. Don’t give up! I’m sure there will be some way we can get out of this, if we just…_

They don’t make it to “stay determined” because Flowey reloads a save from seconds before, pulling you back into the path of vines that nearly take your fingers off.

Sirens. The big kid who saved their fellow captive is strung up for it, wires making their fat arms bulge. Their face is reduced to a blank and replaced with another one of Flowey’s grotesquer ones, sharp teeth and a long tongue hanging out; their body thankfully fades behind the green of their soul as gigantic frying pans appears above you, spilling fire.

Your body goes cold. Your legs buckle. The clang of iron crockery against walls spills inexorable as lava into your mind’s eye. The memories that aren’t yours are bad enough but the phantom pains that flicker up and down arms that your father never burned are worse, make Frisk gasp. Your legs won’t move, you curl up into a ball, wait for pain that doesn’t come. Frisk moans _“Please”_ and you curl up tighter.

Something warm touches your back, soothes your injuries and fills the back of your mouth with a gentle taste. You raise your head just a tiny bit: Someone must have heard Frisk anyway, because there’s a yellow soul in the green one’s place and the pans are tossing fried egg-shaped green bullets at you instead.

You stand still and shiver and let the bullets fall on you, steadying you.

Static again.

You’re getting damn fucking sick of Flowey’s stupid ugly face.

Five of the six tubes that form the shapes of petals around the TV screen are dead, no longer pulsating. When you cut him he yells, and sticky sap drips from the wounds. It’s like trying to dig a hole through solid stone with a pin but you’re making a _dent_ now; if you can just get to the last soul it _has_ to weaken him, right? And the child will heal you. So you hang on as much as you can, ducking fire and bombs and squirming away from vines and fire.

The last klaxon rings. You swallow and brace yourself. You’re getting tired, but Frisk and the player are with you, heartened by what little headway you’ve managed to make.

The final child is pigtailed, wearing a cowboy hat, strung up with arms at their sides in a way that makes your stomach roil for reasons that have nothing to do with how painful it looks or the way their face is a void from which flashes an emoji-like smiley.

You’d be glad when they disappear except that the bullet that shows up in front of you is a gigantic revolver that’s trained on you.

You dodge left, and get hit. You dodge right, and get hit again. The gun fires in two or three bursts of bullets and you _know_ that the child is fighting back and won’t kill you but the noise of the gun going off is almost as bad because you and Frisk startle every time.

The gun clicks and does not disgorge bullets. Frisk seizes their chance and calls.

Instead of bullets, the mouth of the gun spills clovers.

On the screen, the child with the ribbon appears and cuts the cowboy loose.

The others appear too.

Gooseflesh prickles all over as the gun vanishes, as everything vanishes—the dead children’s bodies. Their souls form a wheel and emerge from behind Flowey’s glass-window face, spin wide and surround you and Frisk.

Each of them produces green bullets. Bandaids, thumbs ups, music notes, the word HOPE over and over, sunny sides up, clovers. Your scratches and cuts disappear, your _exhaustion_ disappears, the beginnings of despair from how long this fight dragged on; even the horror of being disemboweled and dismembered so many times loses its edge.

Flowey reemerges from the dark, but—sharp as your eyes have gotten, appraising different monsters for Frisk all this time, you can tell immediately that he seems _empty,_ less solid, less formidable.

“Flowey’s defense has dropped to zero,” you tell Frisk, and shift your grip on your knife.

He shrieks at you and lets loose a volley of bullets. You muscle forward and swing your arm, hacking at his arms, his awful fleshy face, the vines and tubes of his body that seem to go on forever.

You get hit, of course. Thorns tear at you, fire singes Frisk’s clothes, giant flies and fingers and chomping teeth buffet you this way and that, snap bones and try to pull your limbs off. But Frisk’s fellow fallen humans are _awake_ now, wresting control of Flowey’s body away from him, forcing green bullets out through the waves of his attacks. Frisk takes control of their right arm, reaches out to touch the bullets, to accept their aid; you spin and slash and roll and twirl back to back with Frisk so that they can heal themself and you strike at Flowey and you strike and you strike and you strike and you strike and you keep hacking away at him and the blood is singing in your ears—

And you bring your arm down on his face and the knife sinks _deep,_ cracks the glass so that his whole body begins to shake.

Flowey speaks in a distorted howl: “No… NO!!! This _can’t_ be happening…! You… YOU…!”

There is a tug at your middle, and you’re standing several feet behind where you were before. Flowey is leering at you, unhurt.

“You IDIOT.”

Your head _pounds._ Red fills your vision.

And this the worst: It’s exactly the type of stupid baby psyche-out prank that Asriel would have loved. The two things he thought were funniest in the world were leaping out to shock you, not realizing or not caring that the fear choking you made you feel faint and was the cause of the nightmares you’d have for the rest of the week, and getting your hopes up only to tear you down at the last second. He was a kind boy, mostly, gentle and meek and falling all over himself to impress you, but the seed of a bully had set out shoots deep in there and it had not surprised you to learn that you were his only friend.

He was a brat who was very good at playing cute.

You, who got him killed, were worse.

Having the worst of Asriel’s sense of humor reflected at you through a funhouse mirror like this—you feel downright _murderous._ You beat this pissant weed before and you _will_ do it again, and this time you will _chop him into shreds so tiny he disintegrates._

But before you can move, the great jaws of the fleshy head that forms Flowey’s ugly “stem” spread wide, and light erupts from them—

Your body disintegrates—

—with a _pop_ you’re standing back in the same spot—

—Flowey cackles—

—Frisk’s guts spill out with a horrible _slap_ before you realize that vines have torn you open—

—fire, your old horror, withers and melts your flesh—

—the beam again, vaporizing only Frisk’s lower half—

Flowey kills you over and over, every way he can think of, rips you open and crushes you and tears you apart slowly and kills you fast, makes as if to kill you quickly then drags it out, plucks Frisk’s digits off one by one, crushes their head. Finally he brings you back and saves his file yet again, bludgeons you over and over with rings of bullets too tight for you to escape the way he tried to kill Frisk by inches when he first met them.

And he stops, you an inch from death. Your vision is growing hazy; you’re slipping disjointed from your place in control of the body, sliding away. Flowey seems to turn colors and sway back and forth. There’s another of him above you, below, surrounding you.

 _Chara!_ Frisk calls, frantic.

 _I’m sorry,_ you manage. Everything was too close together—the same way the sensation of water lingers once you’ve gotten back up on dry land, the feel of being killed brutally in so many ways is still ringing through you. Your vision doubles and triples, a kaleidoscope of crudely drawn faces. Flowey is giggling and it’s giving you a headache. _I don’t think I can keep shielding you from it._

 _Don’t LEAVE me!_ Frisk is crying, the silly. You don’t think you _could_ leave them, even if you wanted to; you’re just delirious, too weak to keep fighting. This stupid flower has done almost everything your father and the villagers threatened you with, and might yet do the rest. If you take Frisk’s body over again you will just faint and be sick and asphyxiate them, adding another gross death to the pile.

“Did you _really_ think you could defeat ME?” Flowey is gloating in the backdrop. “I am the _god_ of this world. And you? You’re _hopeless._ Hopeless and alone… Golly, that’s right! Your worthless friends can’t save you now. Call for help. I dare you. Cry into the darkness! ‘Mommy! Daddy! Somebody help!’ See what good it does you!”

Frisk is shaking head to toe. Silent, they place their clenched fist on their palm and move their hands in towards their torso.

Flowey is silent, staring down at them for several moments.

Then he smirks.

“But nobody came,” he says, and grins. “Boy! What a shame! _Nooooooobody_ else… is gonna get to see you DIE!!!”

He draws the circle of bullets back and then starts to contract them towards Frisk, cackling all the while.

The bullets disappear.

So do all of Frisk’s injuries.

Flowey narrows his eyes. “What? How’d you…?” He narrows his eyes further. “Well, I’ll just…”

A chime goes off, clear as anything: LOAD FAILED.

Flowey begins to sweat.

You giggle a little in the back of Frisk’s mind. They clench their hands tightly at their waist, still shaking—but you don’t think their shaking’s all fear, anymore.

“Wh—where are my powers?!” There’s panic, but also the distinct whininess of a spoiled child whose toy has gotten taken away. This is what Asriel always sounded like the second before he started with the crocodile tears, determined to get his way by hook or by crook.

You’re still too pummeled to be enraged, which is good, because you don’t want this disgusting little daisy with a god complex to remind you any more of your best friend, who was an asshole and who betrayed you but whom you loved and who deserved better than you. This _thing_ shouldn’t dare to resemble him in any way, and you don’t want to remember the parts of Asriel that you hated when it’s _your_ fault he died.

The yellow and orange souls appear flanking Frisk, the faint shapes of their bodies in life appearing in shades of their soul colors. The blue and purple souls, the cyan and green ones follow suit. They form a phalanx around you and Frisk, and all of them are glaring at Flowey.

“The souls…? What are they doing?” Flowey is still gibbering.

All six of the disembodied children raise their hands. The cyan soul, who is nearest, seems to have their hands up in claws, as if to wrap them around someone’s throat.

Flowey convulses, his gigantic body lighting up in flashes of six colors, shrieking “NO! YOU CAN’T DO THAT!!! YOU’RE SUPPOSED TO OBEY ME!!! STOP, STOP, STOOOOOOOOP!!!!”

 _Mom said it’s their turn to have the xbox,_ you think faintly, and then remember against your will Asriel stretching out and kicking his feet and crying like a three-year-old instead of someone half a year older than you when you got sick of his godmoding and left the room to go find something less vexing.

It’s not funny at all. You laugh and laugh and laugh until you’re sobbing. Frisk wraps their arms around themself, the backs of their hands and their shirtsleeves bathed in the souls’ improvised strobe light.

When the lights clear Frisk is standing in the dark in front of Flowey, who is nothing more than a flower again, crumpled and bent, listing on his stem.

If you wanted to turn him into salad now would be a great time, but you’re much too weak to boot Frisk out of the driver’s seat.

You were really only spotting them for a boss battle that they weren’t up to fighting, anyway. This is still their journey. It should be their choice whether Flowey’s worth racking up the EXP when their record’s still sterling.

 _Don’t,_ says the player.

 _I won’t,_ Frisk says. You have no idea whether they’re speaking to each other now or if they’re both talking to you.

“…What are you doing?” Flowey asks, disgruntled, suspicious. He snorts. “Do you really think I’ve learned anything from this? No.” He turns away.

Frisk frowns and shakes their head.

“Sparing me won’t change anything. Killing me is the only way to end this.”

Flowey doesn’t hang his head again, but keeps staring at Frisk. They stick their tongue out at him.

He _leers._ Beat-up as he is, the light halfway masking his face, the expression is truly ghastly. “If you let me live,” he says, soft and shaky, straightening up, “I’ll come back.”

You think you’re the only one who feels Frisk shiver. They shake their head.

“I’ll kill you.”

Does he even realize how many times he has already? Why would a threat like that scare Frisk _now?_

Maybe Flowey notices this too, because he goes on, eyes bulging. “I’ll kill _everyone.”_

Frisk is shivering again, but still they shake their head.

 _“I’ll kill everyone you love,”_ Flowey hisses, grinning wide.

They swallow. You look on.

Flowey continues to grin at Frisk expectantly, but the expression falls from his face as he realizes that he’s failing to provoke them into attacking. “……why?” he asks, angry and petulant and small.

Frisk huffs and clutches their own arms.

“Why are you being—” Flowey snarls—and then deflates. “Why are you being so nice to me?”

It arrows directly into your gut. You could not possibly breathe, move, speak.

“I can’t understand,” Flowey is wailing, something like tears or sap dripping from his button eyes down his crumpled mouth and wrinkled petals. “I can’t understand! I just can’t understand…”

He retreats into the earth, and is gone.

Frisk takes a deep breath and lets go of their arms. Their knuckles are white from how tight they were holding on. Slowly they raise their hands to wipe their face, carefully pushing moisture away from the corners of their eyes, drying their eyelashes and every crease in their eyelids.

 _Chara? Are you… are you still here?_ they ask, timid.

“I’m here,” you say.

_Are you okay?_

“No,” you say.

They nod and look around. Drawn with them, you realize that you’re no longer standing inside the Barrier, but inside another corridor like the first one where they met Flowey, with another stone archway wrought of purple stone ahead of them.

Frisk takes a deep breath and walks forward. Their steps are small, slow, wobbly.

As soon as they’ve passed beneath the arch, they sink down in the middle of the path onto their knees. They shift back so that their weight is on their behind, curl one leg up to their chest and then their other, tuck their face into their thighs, and begin to cry noisily.

They stay like this for a very long time.


End file.
